A vigilant New York City lawyer foiled Hungarian scam artists allegedly trying to cash in on the Costa Concordia disaster.
Personal-injury lawyer Peter Ronia, who represents actual survivors, said the accused fraudsters tried one of the most brazen cash grabs he’s ever seen.
“In my 20 years of being an attorney, I never had a family ask about money. They always ask, ‘What happened to my loved one?’ never, ‘How much?’ ” Ronia told The Post.
The Hungarian-speaking attorney was already representing six survivors when he got a call from a woman who said her daughter and 5-year-old granddaughter were missing.
He said his suspicions were quickly raised when the woman and the man posing as the child’s father, Zsolt Horvath, kept changing their stories.
“Then [amid a police probe], he shows up at the hotel and says, ‘My daughter is not gone,’ ” said Ronia. When he met the little girl, she told him she had just seen her mother, Roxanna Fiedlerne, that morning.
That’s when the entire scam unraveled. Horvath and Fiedlerne confessed and were arrested.
News of the arrest came as recovery crews in Italy discovered another body from the Jan. 13 shipwreck, raising the death toll to 16.
Meanwhile, Costa Concordia Capt. Francesco Schettino told a friend that the cruise ship line’s manager pressured him to sail too closely to the rocks.
“The rocks were there, but the instruments I had weren’t showing them, so I went through,” Schettino said.
Schettino, who had a beautiful blond with him on the ship’s bridge and claimed he tripped his way into a lifeboat, said, “So, here we are and it’s me who’s paying for everything.”